People have relied on scientists for answers to some pretty big questions, and natural disasters are no exception. But when people don't like those answers, how are scientists supposed to communicate with the public? In this episode, seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones discusses the disconnect between disasters, psychology, and science communication, and helps us understand how to handle inconvenient truths in a healthy way. Additional resources from Dr. Lucy Jones: "The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)" Dr. Lucy Jones' website Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society The Ring of Fire and other earthquake myths Other resources discussed: Number of fatalities caused by natural disasters in the United States from 1900 to 2016, by disaster type Tremors and treatments: how developing nations can mitigate the destruction of earthquakes How do we know what other planets (and stars, galaxies, etc.) are made of? (Intermediate) Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
People have relied on scientists for answers to some pretty big questions, and natural disasters are no exception. But when people don't like those answers, how are scientists supposed to communicate with the public? In this episode, seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones discusses the disconnect between disasters, psychology, and science communication, and helps us understand how to handle inconvenient truths in a healthy way.
Additional resources from Dr. Lucy Jones:
Other resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/natural-disasters-have-transformed-how-scientists-communicate
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious, is there a way to avoid natural disasters?
LUCY JONES: No. Natural disasters are an absolute inevitable part of the natural processes that make life on Earth possible. What we can do is avoid damaging our cities by how we build them.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi. I'm Cody Gough with the solidly-built Curiosity.com
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, we're going to get an inside look at natural disasters and how they've shaped the way we communicate for centuries.
CODY GOUGH: Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity podcast.
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CODY GOUGH: Today isn't just a show about natural disasters. It's a conversation about how scientists communicate with the public.
ASHLEY HAMER: Dr. Lucy Jones is a leading seismologist who spent more than 30 years in federal service with the US Geological Survey, or USGS, and works with the seismological laboratory at Caltech.
CODY GOUGH: Her new book is called The Big Ones-- How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them. And it's really interesting deep dive into some of history's biggest natural events from volcanoes to floods and everything in between.
ASHLEY HAMER: But this episode is not about doom and gloom. It could make you see scientists in a new light and maybe even challenge how you think about your own thinking.
CODY GOUGH: But before we get into the interview, I just want to do a quick update on your recovery process. Actually, our loyal listeners know that you ran the Boston Marathon in the pouring rain, by the way. And we want to know how were you feeling?
ASHLEY HAMER: Pretty good. Most of my aches and pains are gone. I've gone from eating everything in sight to eating like a normal person. Usually, after I run a marathon, I like to tighten up my diet and really focus on getting enough protein. And lately, I've been obsessed with this super high protein pasta. It's called Explore Cuisine Edamame Spaghetti. And it's got about as much protein as a chicken breast and half the carbs of regular pasta.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Again, you get 25% off your first order and a free 30-day trial at thrivemarket.com/curiosity. No special code is necessary. Just shop around and the discount will apply at checkout. We'll put a link in the show notes, but one more time, that's thrivemarket.com/curiosity. Now, let's talk to Dr. Lucy Jones.
CODY GOUGH: What can we do about a natural disaster?
LUCY JONES: We can do nothing about stopping the natural hazard. We don't stop plate tectonics. The earthquakes are going to continue to happen. The volcanoes will continue to erupt. We're making the meteorological disasters more common with all the extra heat we're putting into the atmosphere.
What we can do about them, though, is prevent the human catastrophe. We can build buildings that don't fall down in earthquakes. We can recognize that living on the side of a volcano is not a great idea. There's a lot of ways in which if we take it into account, we can build human systems that can handle the variability of the system.
The problem is that the variability happens on long enough time frames. It's pretty hard to convince short-lived humans that it's worth planning for something that maybe is hundreds of years out. And so usually, what our challenge is not-- is often historically informed. We're living on the bank of a river that floods on a regular basis or on the side of a volcano.
I mean, Naples, Italy, there's probably not a lot it can do to stop-- Vesuvius will erupt again at some time. And what they've got to be able to do is predict it and get out. But they're not going to be able to preserve much of the city because of that.
CODY GOUGH: The river that might flood, that's a regular occurrence. And I think of the people in New Orleans. One of the chapters is dedicated to Hurricane Katrina, of course. There are spots that seem on a very short-term cycle very likely to experience disasters and problems, forest fires in California, you name it. So do you know the psychology or do you understand what draws people to stay there anyway?
LUCY JONES: Well, there's a human tendency to not want to believe the worst is true. There's a very strong tendency-- there's an interesting equation to control the rate at which disasters happen. For every disaster, you have a power-law distribution pretty much. The smallest event, which means the small events are really common. The larger events get less than-- less common. And the very biggest ones are extremely rare.
So when we as human beings experience this, what we've experienced in our lifetime seems the definition of what we should be expecting. And I have found here in Southern California that the emergency managers or city people who responded to Northridge have a harder time believing what the big San Andreas' earthquake is actually going to be like than the ones with no experience, because they went through Northridge. It was extremely difficult, and they got through. And they did a good job, and they're like, hey, see we know how to do this.
Convincing them that wasn't the big earthquake becomes more difficult than dealing with the people who don't actually have the experience. So it's-- psychologists tell us there's something called a normalization bias, that whatever is-- what we're experiencing now, that's what we think really matters. And you can see from an evolutionary perspective that that's a pretty good trait. I mean, if you're worried about 100-year flood and ignoring the wolf that's attacking your children, your DNA is not going to be making it into the evolutionary pool.
So there's strong reasons for why we focus on the immediate. And then there's another part of that psychology is humans don't generally make decisions about probability-- from probabilities. We make decisions from emotional bases. And it's like we might be able to use statistics to convince you of a certain risk, but deciding to take action requires more of an emotional connection.
And emotions come from stories. And if the disaster is far enough back that you don't have stories from your parents or your grandparents, it's really hard to make it real.
CODY GOUGH: You write about some that have been known for centuries. Pompeii, the main one, of course; the volcano eruption in Iceland that killed millions which-- I bring up some of the older disasters that you write about because you also write about the winter 1861/1862, the flood that devastated California and which you argue was probably the worst natural disaster the state has ever seen. But when you think of California disasters, you think of fires and earthquakes, not really floods, right?
LUCY JONES: Exactly. I'm a fourth generation in Southern California. My family came here in 1870s. And I had never heard of this flood.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
LUCY JONES: It was just-- it was in 1861/62 before our family arrived, but nobody talks about it here. And it was only when I was leading a project at the USGS to create scenarios of great disasters, and we were looking at what should be the appropriate model for the flood, that the hydrologists started talking about this event. And I was just astonished that something this devastating could have happened.
I mean, it's well documented in the New York Times. I found all sorts of articles about it. And most Californians don't know. And it more devastating than the 1906 earthquake. It killed 1% of the population. It bankrupted the state. It destroyed one third of the taxable land.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
LUCY JONES: And changed the nature of our society, because up until that point, the main industry in California was ranching. And 200,000 head of cattle were drowned in the flood. And the ranching industry fell apart, and they weren't able to afford to re-establish. And they switched to farming instead of ranching.
And to me, it was-- exemplifies the sort of psychological perspective we have about disasters. There's a couple of them. One is something we can't see is more frightening than something we can see. I mean, again, that's another deep evolutionary pressure. The one you can't see and that you don't know when it's coming is more dangerous because you don't know how to protect yourself.
So we are always more afraid of earthquakes than rain. I mean, who's afraid of the rain? You can see it coming. It's predicted. But the reality is across America floods kill more people than earthquakes do. And even here in California, there were probably 4,000 people who died in that one event and something like 3,000 in the 1906 earthquake, but you just aren't afraid of the rain.
ASHLEY HAMER: Water does way more damage than most of us give it credit for. According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, of all the deaths from natural disasters that happened in the US from 1900 to 2016, flooding is number 2 on the list. That's right below tropical cyclones, a category that includes hurricanes, and right above convective storms, which are the cause of things like tornadoes and heavy rain and hail.
Earthquakes, they're only number 5 with only a third of the fatalities claimed by floods. They even claim fewer lives than heat waves, which are another bit of weather that we experience all the time but never seem to worry about. And that's since 1900. So these statistics include the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a 7.9 magnitude tremor that's considered the deadliest in US history. Earthquakes might be scary, but it's the water that'll get you.
LUCY JONES: So it's both that we need this close up memory or we have a hard time focusing on it. And we often aren't very rational about assessing our risks. There are a lot of factors, especially unpredictability and unseen, that make a disaster more frightening.
CODY GOUGH: I don't think humans are particularly well known for being rational creatures.
LUCY JONES: Oh, oh, well, yes, right. We evolved our intelligence to survive against predators with stronger muscles and bigger teeth. And the ability to make patterns was how we used our brain to keep ourselves safe. And there, you need to be right, but the other part of it was we were doing this in a hyper-socialized setting within our clans. And you needed to be sure that you weren't the one who went out and fought the predator while the other people stayed safe in the clan.
So it's very important to win arguments. The ability to win arguments is probably more important than the ability to be right. And they never ran statistical tests to be sure that the patterns are correct. So we have a very strong human psychology that's called a confirmation bias. We believe things that we are-- we believe in the data that supports what we already believe. And we are much more critical of data that contradicts that.
And it's sort of you can say that's why the scientific method exists, why we have peer review, because the easiest person to fool is ourselves. And scientists are just as subject to confirmation bias as anybody else. But having acknowledged that and established peer review in which we take our pet project, our intellectual offspring and hand it to a competitor and ask them to trash it, that's what peer review is. And it's how we keep ourselves looking at truth and not just on what we want to believe.
It's a hard process. Humans don't like it. But when you look at how we look at disasters over time, we don't usually go through that. We mostly are trying to form the patterns that will be safe. And when it's fundamentally a random distribution, we make up patterns. We attribute it to the gods. We blame the victims. We have a lot of different ways in which we try to find a way to make ourselves safe in what is inherently a random process.
CODY GOUGH: That is wild to me, that we have had-- I have interviewed on the Curiosity podcast linguists, artificial intelligence experts, people who work in the humanities, neurologists, psychologists, and now you have mentioned confirmation bias. I would not have expected confirmation bias to jump out in geology of all places.
It's so prevalent and pervasive. It's incredible to me. It's like the scientific thing. Is this-- have you noticed in the scientific community that a lot of attention is being paid to it these days?
LUCY JONES: Yes, and it's partly-- I mean, for us hard scientists, it's recognizing we had already gotten-- peer review has been around for a long time without anybody talking about confirmation bias. But it helps us understand why we're doing it and seeing what the issues are, because it is so easy to fool yourself. And I think it's also partly right now, how come climate change isn't believed?
I mean, as a scientist, I just go, I don't get it. How can you take what's so clearly true and just reject it because you don't like it? And as we look at that issue, part of it is how-- the difference in communication styles between scientists and non-scientists. We so assume that the people who we're talking to are critiquing our science and need to be convinced that we did it right. So when we give a result, we talk about how we set up the experiment and what our methodology was and very carefully go through our uncertainty analysis before we give the answer.
When we communicate that way with people who aren't critiquing us, who are just asking us for the answer, by the time we finish talking about all the uncertainties, what they've heard is that we don't know what we're talking about. And so as we-- this is-- it's come up to me as we've been Earth scientists engaged in public communication. We've been having to really look at what did we do wrong, how did we get to this place. And recognizing the very different approach that scientists and non-scientists take towards talking about uncertainty, to me, is part of the important answer on how we've gotten derailed in the climate change discussion.
ASHLEY HAMER: A great illustration of how vitally important uncertainty is to the scientific process is something called P value. P value is a number that tells you how likely it is that the result of a scientific experiment didn't happen by random chance. And you have to include that number every time you report a scientific result.
For example, let's say you want to see if a drug helped lower blood pressure. You'd get a bunch of volunteers and give them pills. Only half of them get the real drug, and half get a sugar pill that looks identical. You record the results of the two groups. Then do some fancy statistical analysis and come up with a P value, which is always somewhere between 0 and 1.
A higher number is bad. That means it has a good chance of being result from random chance, and the drug probably isn't having an effect. Generally, you want your number to be less than 0.05 or 0.01. Different fields set their bar at different levels. When your results meet that bar, they're considered statistically significant. Not proven, not 100% for sure, just statistically significant. There's still a fraction of a chance that your results were a fluke.
Of course, normal people don't talk this way. I definitely locked the door to my apartment this morning. My cat is absolutely the cutest cat in the world. And chunky peanut butter is 100% better than creamy. When casual everyday language meets precise scientific jargon, wires can cross, and misunderstandings can happen. We've got to meet in the middle.
Scientists finding new ways to communicate their science is a great thing, but it also won't hurt for everyday people to learn a bit more about what uncertainty means in science. Listeners to this podcast are taking a big step right now.
CODY GOUGH: Hey, Ashley. Real quick I want to mention that the Curiosity podcast is brought to you by Skillshare.
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CODY GOUGH: Was that part of the reason you wrote this book, to help communicate these ideas and try to reach people in a way where people who are sitting around thinking, well, I'm not going to get hit by a huge earthquake, might maybe rethink that?
LUCY JONES: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I spent 33 years with the USGS here at Caltech. And in that time, I have done thousands of interviews after various earthquakes. And through that process, it's given me some sort of an experiential information about how people think about disasters.
And I knew there were ideas that I wanted to communicate. Part of it is just-- was to help people see things as a geologist does where 10,000 years is recent, and our human lifespan is just this little blip on this larger process, but also to see just how preventable most of the losses were if we were willing to take it. But also then part of what I came to understand in doing all those interviews was how much people were looking at me not for scientific information so much as for reassurance.
And this is-- so I said as scientists, we always start by talking about all our uncertainties. We're like the only people in the world who really like uncertainty. To the rest of the world, uncertainty is extra scary. And what they were doing in coming to ask a seismologist about the fault when the earthquake happens-- I mean, knowing what the fault is or the magnitude or what the research is not going to help you rebuild your house, but it puts that scary thing back into a box.
It says somebody understands it. I give it a name. I give it a number. I give it a fault. And I make it seem manageable again. And recognizing through hard experience that that's really what was going on. And then when we as scientists talked about our uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, we got people a lot more scared, right?
So part of this was to try to explore this idea of how we feel about uncertainty and how we feel about randomness. And it was-- it turned out to be this incredibly fun process to write a book. It's so different than writing science papers. I'd have written hundreds of science papers, but a book is a very different experience. And I had to find a storytelling voice.
Scientists know that stories mislead you, and you don't do that. But realizing stories would help people comprehend this stuff helped me try to move beyond it. And as I researched the stories and told them, I came to a new understanding about how many different ways we try to explain away randomness.
I mean, even the word disaster itself comes from the Latin dis-aster, ill-starred. It comes from the belief that your fate is written in the stars, and you got the bad ones when you were hit by a disaster. So from sort of beginning of Western culture, we have tried to find out-- make a pattern in what was random.
The same thing goes on in Asia too. They have less of a personal relationship with a god and more of an emphasis on social harmony. So there, you see earthquakes being attributed to a yin-yang imbalance, where the yin, Earth, overpowers the yang, sky. When there's too much yin in the system, you get earthquakes. If there's too much yang in the system, you get hurricanes because the sky is out of control.
But that-- it's the same idea. How do we explain away this randomness that is so terrifying? And when there isn't a local physical thing you can use, you put it on the things that can't be contradicted.
CODY GOUGH: Well, and the ancient Greek oracles would attribute it to the Greek gods, of course, but what they were doing was accomplishing the same thing that you're talking about. You said that presenting this science and making people feel better just by communicating that, hey, there are people that understand this. Sure, your research is backed by science, and there are measurable ways to actually prove that you do understand it. But they weren't kind of trying to do the same thing back then even just saying, oh, it's the gods that would placate everybody.
LUCY JONES: Right. I am accomplishing the same things that shamans were doing, how to make the unknown scary seem manageable. And when I said-- when I came to that awareness, it gave me a different understanding of what I was doing when I gave interviews after earthquakes. So now, one of the other things that happens because of that is that as scientists, we're much more interested in what we don't know, right?
Once it's settled, we sort of stop caring. It's not a subject of research anymore. So when the reporters would come out and faced with a bunch of geeks and how do we get these guys talking, the usual question is, what did you learn in the earthquake? They know that gets a scientist to be really excited and give them something they can use.
But the scientists, in general, are pretty literal-minded. And when somebody asks you what you learned, you answer that question. So we would talk about what we didn't know about the earthquakes before this one happened and what was different in this one.
What that meant, though, was that every time people were listening to us, we were telling them what we didn't know. And we never said actually, there's really nothing much to learn in this earthquake, is it just did all the damage that we already had told you was going to happen. That was not a message that often got given.
And I started trying to do that. When they asked what did you learn, I would say most of this is really pretty standard. This building down-- we changed the building code for that back in 1980. And it was interesting to shift that way. It was actually more reassuring. Yeah, we understood this. We just haven't chosen to act on it. And it also it's-- I think it's contributed to helping us start to take some action.
CODY GOUGH: And you do write about action in the book. So in addition to reassuring people that everything's going to be fine because we do know what's actually going on, what initiatives are going on right now to prevent utter disaster as a fallout from an earthquake or another unexpected event?
LUCY JONES: There really is a lot. So here in Southern California, which is where I've been working most closely, just before I left the USGS, I ended up spending a year with the mayor of Los Angeles. I actually went to City Hall every day. And they came up with a plan for earthquake resilience. And the city's acted on it.
There have been a huge number of initiatives that have been undertaken. And we're seeing a lot of potential vulnerabilities being fixed. In the last few years, the other cities of Southern California, there's 192 cities in Southern California, have been watching this and seeing that Mayor Garcetti did not suffer politically for taking this on. In fact, he has become incredibly popular. Obviously, he's done plenty more than this, but it didn't hurt him.
So we're now seeing other communities starting to take on much of the-- some of these other activities. We have 40 different cities that are working with the nonprofit I started to better understand the risk and move towards seismic resilience. We're seeing state-level initiatives to strengthen our building code going on.
And on a broader picture around the world, just the whole idea of resilience has gone in the last decade from a topic nobody even understood what that meant to being taken on around the world. The Rockefeller Foundation has funded something they call the 100 Resilient Cities, paying for a chief resilience officer in the mayor's office in 100 different cities. Part of it, I think, is the difference of globalization and telecommunications.
That might sound a little funny, but we have-- because of the advent of rapid communications, now when a disaster hits somewhere else in the world, we are able to experience it immediately. And when the tsunami went in Japan in 2011, I sat in Southern California and watched in real time photographs from-- aerial photographs or video showing the wave moving in on the city. And it's much more real to us now.
So we are starting to have a connection and empathy. And it's helping us overcome our normalization bias because around the world, these disasters are much more common. And if we can experience them through telecommunications, we don't have to suffer so directly ourselves to have been empowered to act.
CODY GOUGH: But how far has architecture and construction come? How much can we physically protect ourselves from these earthquakes?
LUCY JONES: We could absolutely physically protect ourselves. We have not chosen to do so. So the current building code says as long as you can crawl out alive, that's a success.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
LUCY JONES: We say that if you choose to build a building that's so weak that it's a total financial loss, that was your choice to make. The role of government is to make sure you don't kill somebody in the process. So what they sort of philosophically considered the minimum has practically become the maximum, because if you build a building stronger than that, as a developer, you're not going to be able to sell it for more money. And you aren't going to get your money back.
So what we are seeing is we have a city full of buildings built to what we call a life safety standard. For 1% more in construction costs, we could be building it to a functional recovery standard. Meaning we can return it to its full functioning within a short period of time after the disaster.
And there are very few individuals that will choose to do it that way. For instance, Caltech being a place that understands earthquake and builds to its own buildings has always built them 50% stronger than the code required. And that would add about 1% to the cost of construction.
CODY GOUGH: Just 1%.
LUCY JONES: Just 1%. I know. And we know how to do it, right? We're already building stronger buildings when you're near the fault and when you're farther away. So we know what it costs to do this. We just haven't chosen to do it for the rest of our buildings.
And that's one of the things that I'm seeing changing at the state level. There is a bill up in front of the California State legislature to move us to functional recovery. Actually, I went to Sacramento and testified on it, sort of a new life post-government. And it got passed through committee. So it's going through the process. And when you understand it's 1%, it's really hard to think about why we don't do it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Of course, we're mostly talking about industrialized nations here. It's worth stopping to think about countries that don't have those resources. I'm from Northern California where earthquakes are pretty common. On January 9, 2010, my hometown experienced a 6.5 magnitude earthquake. Three days later, Haiti experienced a magnitude 7 earthquake.
I've since learned that the difference between a 6.5 and a 7-magnitude earthquake is actually pretty large. But even so, the difference in damage between the two quakes has stuck with me for years. In my hometown, there were power outages and damage to older buildings. The auditorium at my old high school was closed for a while. I remember seeing a picture in the paper of a grocery store aisle where all of the wine bottles had broken on the floor.
But there were no deaths and minimal injuries. Compare that to Haiti, where a quarter of a million people died during the quake and in the months after. It's pretty sobering to think about. The problem is the developing nations can only do so much with what they have. When you're trying to use limited resources to help the most people possible, building codes probably aren't top of mind, especially if your last big earthquake was 25 years ago, as it was in Haiti.
But there are efforts to change this. Many countries rebuilding after devastating quakes have not only replaced dangerous structures, but have also done less expensive things like give their emergency response teams better training and develop country wide disaster drills. Scientists are also working on devices that can be buried in the ground to absorb seismic waves. Although they have a pretty steep price tag, it just isn't enough yet.
As Australia's SBS show Dateline concludes, quote, "Disaster mitigation is still looked upon as a luxury good, an expectation in privileged countries and out of reach for many developing countries."
CODY GOUGH: What's the call to action for individuals? The government is doing a lot, but what's the biggest takeaway for what we as individuals can do about preparing for natural disasters?
LUCY JONES: Yes, there's a role of government, and there's a role of individuals. You can get a lot of great information from FEMA or whatever. But then between those two are our communities and our community organizations. And my call to action is work with your community to make it safer.
What I want individuals to do is to work with someone else. Go to some place where you connect with other people, your neighbors, your congregation, your school, family, whatever it is. Work with them to get ready, and then we'll-- you'll have a better community along the way.
Anything that's done to make us better able to get through the earthquake is also something that's helping us on every day. But whatever it is, your community probably has a risk. Maybe it's not earthquakes, but just about every one of us is subject to significant natural disasters because the processes that lead to disasters are also the processes that make the Earth a productive place.
So volcanoes give us fertile soil. The faults will trap water and give us springs. But obviously, the rivers that flood also water our crops and provide transportation. So we are-- all of our cities are preferentially built towards places with a high level of hazard, and we all have something. So the other thing I would tell people is the first thing you should do is figure out what your own hazard is.
There are lots of great sources from NOAA for meteorological disasters or the USGS for geologic disasters. Research what your problems are and what are the fixes, because almost every one of them has a good fix out there too. And if you can figure that out, then you can be in a position to make yourself safer. And you're all going to be able to cope and do a better job after the event.
CODY GOUGH: I want to wrap up with a final segment we do on our show called The Curiosity Challenge. I'm going to ask you a trivia question about something I learned about on Curiosity.com that I think you'll find interesting. All right, so I understand that classical music is a hobby of yours.
LUCY JONES: Yes, it is.
CODY GOUGH: All right, great. So I have a music question for you. In 1980, Sony and Philips decided that a standard CD should hold exactly 74 minutes worth of audio. Now, part of the reason for this precise number is that several executives from both companies decided it was important that one specific piece of classical music could fit on one side. And 74 minutes was at the time the longest recording of that piece. Do you know what piece of classical music it was?
LUCY JONES: That's fascinating. I have no idea, and I'd love to know.
CODY GOUGH: It is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
LUCY JONES: Oh, of course. Probably the most popular piece of classical music out there.
CODY GOUGH: I know. I should have given you a hint.
LUCY JONES: No, I probably-- see, I love classical music, but once I discovered the 17th century, I didn't see any reason to return to the 20th. And I play all early music at this point.
CODY GOUGH: What do you play?
LUCY JONES: I play something called the viola da gamba. It's a Renaissance predecessor of the cello.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
LUCY JONES: Yeah, I do occasionally play 18th century music. I'm now in a Baroque orchestra, but 18th is as far up as I come.
CODY GOUGH: That's really cool. That's really cool. Do you have a random trivia that's anything at all?
LUCY JONES: In the 18th century, the viola da gamba was the premier solo instrument. What happened? How did it disappear?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, was it because it was too expe-- wait, wait. Hold on. Money is the root of everything. So it has to have to do with money. So it must be that some big violin manufacturer or something made the violin just a lot cheaper and distributed it better?
LUCY JONES: No, but it's money in a sense. The gamba was the aristocrat's instrument. So King Charles I was a accomplished player, kept composers in court. When the Cromwell's revolution happened, they not only killed the king. They tried to destroy every gamba in England, and only about 100 survived.
It continued on the continent, but Marie Antoinette played the gamba. And by the time the revolution happened in France, that was pretty much the end of the instrument. Compounded by one other factor is that it was quieter than the violin family. And so when we moved away from music being in the courts to being in symphony halls, it wasn't loud enough to keep up with violins.
CODY GOUGH: That's an amazing trivia question.
LUCY JONES: And it's coming back now. The Viola da Gamba Society of America has over 1,000 members. And there's quite a resurgence in the instrument because now we have amplifiers. We don't have to worry about what goes on in the concert hall in quite the same way.
CODY GOUGH: Dr. Lucy Jones, thank you so much for joining me on the Curiosity podcast.
LUCY JONES: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Get out your telescopes. It's time for the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Julian from Houston who writes, I was curious-- yeah, you were, Julian, about how astrophysicists can predict the chemical composition of an exoplanet light years away. In other words, Julian wants to know how scientists know what distant stars and planets are made of. The answer after this.
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CODY GOUGH: Ashley, you've been working here longer than me. How did you hear about Curiosity.com?
ASHLEY HAMER: Strangely, it was through this really cool Chrome extension that we have.
CODY GOUGH: A Chrome extension?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I learned about this cool thing you could add to your Chrome browser that would tell you a fact every time you opened a new tab. And I had been using it for about six months when I applied for this job.
CODY GOUGH: That is crazy. And you can still get the Chrome extension?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, I use it. Everyone in the office uses it. Do you use it, Cody?
CODY GOUGH: I just started using it as a matter of fact. And you too can get smarter each time you open a new tab with the Curiosity Smart Tab Chrome extension.
ASHLEY HAMER: Our expert editors and designers, which include me now, have created short, fun topics to learn each time you open a new tab in Google Chrome.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it is really cool. You just click on the topics you like best to dive deeper into that topic on Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: With this extension, you just never stop learning. It's got 63 5-star reviews. Here's what people are saying.
CODY GOUGH: Ariel Sanchez wrote a review that just said, the best extension.
ASHLEY HAMER: Angeline Warnock said, this is my favorite extension ever.
CODY GOUGH: And ever is in all caps, so you know it's serious.
ASHLEY HAMER: Definitely.
CODY GOUGH: You can find it on the Chrome Web Store. Again, it's called the Curiosity Smart Tab, or we'll have a link in the show notes. Never stop learning.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm detecting the extra credit answer. Julian wanted to know how we can identify what stars and planets are made of from light years away. The answer is super cool. While we've determined the chemical composition of a lot of the planets in our solar system by sending spacecraft to probe the atmosphere and sometimes bring back a few samples, we obviously can't do that with objects light years away. Instead, we analyze their light.
Every element on the periodic table gives off light in its own spectrum of colors. The colors emitted by hydrogen are different than those emitted by sulfur, for instance. Astronomers use a device called a spectrometer that can take that light and spread it out into its individual components, kind of like a prism takes white light and spreads it out into the colors of the rainbow.
They'll take the light of a far off object, whether that's a star, a planet, or even a cloud of dust, run it through a spectrometer to find out which colors are coming off of it, then match those colors to the elements that produce them. It's like every object has its own barcode, and we just need a spectrometer to read it. Thanks for your question.
If you have a question about the universe or the world around you that's been nagging at you, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com. And I might answer it on a future show.
CODY GOUGH: That's all for this week. Subscribe to this podcast, and you can get smarter every day in just a few minutes on our new daily episodes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or join us next week for another deep dive into what we don't know.
CODY GOUGH: Because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: Jeez, you really like that line, huh?
CODY GOUGH: It's a great line.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, it is. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.